Refractive surgery with kansas city lasik specialists for example, whether correcting myopia, astigmatism, hypermetropia, or presbyopia, is no exception to the rule that there is no surgery without operative risk. The need to provide the patient who is a candidate for Lasik laser surgery, or by any technique whatsoever, with precise and detailed information on the risks of the surgery has moreover become a legal obligation, which has all the more value that this surgery is not necessarily essential.
The essential function of the preoperative assessment is to eliminate patients who, because of their preoperative characteristics, do not correspond to good candidates for this surgery. For laser Lasik surgery with discover vision for example, corneal topography is the key examination here since it makes it possible to detect situations of the fragile cornea for which surgery could involve complications, even late, and this is the risk of corneal ectasia, which we are looking for very carefully. We also strive to identify situations involving a risk of impaired quality of vision, which can be observed in patients with large pupils, where there may be a risk of impaired ability—night driving. When a phakic implant is considered, analysis of the internal surface of the cornea is essential and will be an important element of long-term monitoring.
When this assessment has eliminated the anomalies likely to constitute risks of this type, and the patient is therefore declared operable, the notion of risk does not completely disappear, but it is then a question of rare risks and minor gravity:
- Infectious risk, the incidence of which is much lower than that of infections in contact lens wearers
- Risk of inflammatory reaction
- Risk of imperfect optical result, most often accessible to retouching
- Risk of healing problems or micro-displacement of the corneal flap in the event of untimely rubbing in the early postoperative period
- Risk of technical incidents during the intervention
- Risks specific to each technique, whether laser Lasik, phakic implants or clear lens exchange, where the potential complications are those of cataract surgery
None of these risks can be reduced to zero, but it is the incompressible risk of any surgical procedure to be weighed against the expected benefit on the one hand and the risks of alternative correction techniques, and we must here keep in mind the risk of infectious complications in contact lens wearers.
It should be noted that, without being zero, the risks of surgery for myopia or presbyopia are extremely low when the indication for surgery has been established.
